High School Physics

It would be nice if one could connect two (or more!) Voyagers to the same device—say to an Android device or an iOS device running an app that could display concurrent data collection from both Voyagers.  Such a capability is possible by the use of Phyphox (physical phone experiments), an app developed at the 2nd Institute of Physics of the RWTH Aachen University in Germany.  The author of this lesson has been working with a pre-release Android version of this app that supports BLE (Bluet

Let’s imagine two scenarios:

1.       Two identical vehicles, each of whose speedometers reads 50 mph, travel toward each other and experience a head-on collision.

2.       Another identical vehicle, traveling at 50 mph, hits an unmovable, unbreakable and impenetrable rock wall.

Which collision is more severe from the viewpoint of one of these vehicles?

Have your students attach Voyager to a Speedway Wonder™ car, set up a Speedway track of their own design, and they will be ready to challenge one another in a unique way.  The main idea is to collect angular velocity data while Voyager circuits the track.  Then by carefully studying the angular velocity graphs produced, determine posible layouts of the track.  A magnet at one location along the track, coupled with simultaneously measuring magneti

Engage your students in engineering practices and classic force and motion and energy concepts in a fun and unique way. With a PocketLab attached to a Hot Wheels car and a track full of magnets, you'll be able to collect data on position, velocity, acceleration, and energy as your car zips up an over hills and around loops. Turn your students into theme park engineers and have them design "roller coaster" tracks, iterate on car designs for races, or teach basic concepts on position and velocity. This activity is sure to help engage your students in a meaningful way. 

The ability to quickly match empirical data to well-known mathematical models is an essential feature in the analysis of experiments.  This technique is generally referred to as curve-fitting.  The up-and-coming, but not yet leased, CloudLab software from PocketLab provides an easy way to fit data to models including linear, quadratic, power, exponential, and logarithmic.  This curve-fitting can be done for any selected region of PocketLab data.  This lesson provides a sneak preview of this CloudLab featu

Collection of angular velocity and acceleration sensor data is prone to seemingly random “noisy” variations, even when the associated motion appears to be smooth to the observer.  The easiest way to compensate for this variation is to compute the mean value for the duration of such a random variation.  The up-and-coming, but not yet leased, CloudLab software from PocketLab provides an easy way to compute means, standard deviations, and other statistics for a selected region of PocketLab data.

Sensor-based inquiry is a dominant force in today’s science education, with the calibration of sensors being essential for high-quality measurement.  Wikipedia® defines calibration as “the comparison of measurement values delivered by a device under test with those of a calibration standard of known accuracy.”  In this lesson students will study the process of calibration:

The maker revolution has grown by leaps and bounds during the past four years. With dozens of robotic toys for learning and discovery now in the marketplace, it makes sense to give students opportunities for interfacing these robots with the investigative powers of PocketLab Voyager. This lesson describes an example project by which students interface Voyager with Modular Robotics Cubelets—robot blocks that magnetically connect to form an endless variety of robots. There are seventeen different blocks in three categories—sense, think, and act.

This lesson is motivated by an article by Paul G. Hewitt entitled “Sailing into the Wind: A Vector Explanation”, appearing in the Summer 2017 edition of NSTA’s The Science Teacher. Why not put a sail on a Teacher Geek® cart powered by wind from a fan and confined to move along a track?

In addition to being a fascinating toy, the ZéCar flywheel powered car can be utilized in physics curricula to study conservation of energy.  It is available from a variety of sources, including teachersource.com for under $14.  In this lesson students study energy conservation, including gravitational potential energy, translational kinetic energy, rotational kinetic energy, and work done against non-conservative frictional forces, with emphasis on comparing ZéCar with the PocketLab Teacher Geek